A freeway call box along the westbound 60 freeway near the Pedley Road exit sits covered in plastic on Wednesday, Jan. 11. Riverside County officials are retiring two-thirds of freeway call boxes around the county as usage continues to plummet and technological advances require expensive upgrades to keep them working. San Bernardino County is retiring one of every five.

Use of call boxes along Inland freeways has been in free fall for years, as motorists turned to cell phones to notify authorities of emergencies.

Now, rising costs to upgrade the highway phones to keep pace with evolving technology is spurring a large-scale removal.

Transportation officials say they are removing almost two-thirds of call boxes in Riverside County and one in five in San Bernardino.

“The idea of the call boxes is to provide one more layer of option for people to look to for help,” said John Standiford, deputy executive director for the Riverside County Transportation Commission. “But you have to eventually consider the cost of maintaining and keeping a network that is being used less and less.”

The commission, which maintains Riverside County’s network, decided recently to scale it back. The San Bernardino County Transportation Authority made a similar decision.

Standiford said the number of Riverside County boxes is being trimmed from 681 to about 250.

Watkins said San Bernardino County’s new total is 1,021, down from to 1,243.

It’s hard to miss the call boxes being taken out of service. They’re wrapped in plastic bags.

Bruce Laycook, 60, of Redlands, said he noticed a slew of bagged boxes recently as he drove on Interstate 10 to Phoenix, where he conducts information technology training for hospitals.

It looks like every other box outside Blythe is being taken out, Laycook said Monday.

“There are lengthy periods where the temperature is well in excess of 110,” he said. “That means that having them as far apart as they are now is problematic.”

When introduced in the early 1990s, call boxes sprouted along highways throughout the Inland region.

They are prominent along busy urban freeways such as the 10, 15, 215, 91 and 60. They also can be found along mountain and desert roads.

Standiford said the Riverside County commission considered such factors as traffic volume, cell-phone signal strength and remoteness in determining where to keep boxes.

Tim Watkins, a spokesman for the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority, said his agency made a point of retaining boxes in remote areas.

“I guarantee you, those who need it are thrilled that it still exists,” Watkins said. “And those who need it include those who have cell phones.”

As convenient as they are, there are places where cell phones don’t work, Watkins said.

Standiford noted cell phone batteries sometimes run down while people are on the road. And there are still some people who don’t have them.

Most do, however. The Pew Research Center says 90 percent of adults own cell phones.

The decline in call box use has been steep. In the 1990s, annual calls placed from Riverside County boxes peaked at 88,000, the commission said in a staff report. Last year, there were 3,667.

At the same time, the technology keeps changing.

The report said original boxes operated on the analog cellular network, or 1G, then was upgraded to digital cellular, or 2G, in 2005. That technology became obsolete the first of this year, when 3G/LTE replaced it.

Remaining boxes were upgraded at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to accommodate the change.

Despite the ubiquitousness of the cell phone, Watkins said it’s not time to eliminate call boxes entirely.

Dave is a general assignment reporter based in Riverside, writing about a wide variety of topics ranging from drones and El Nino to trains and wildfires. He has worked for five newspapers in four states: Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and California. He earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Colorado State University in 1981. Loves hiking, tennis, baseball, the beach, the Lakers and golden retrievers. He is from the Denver area.